I feel compelled to comment on the Supreme Court’s latest Obamacare decision, though I could sum up my reaction with one word: disgust.

I’m disgusted that we had politicians who decided in 2009 and 2010 to further screw up the healthcare system with Obamacare.

I’m disgusted the IRS then decided to arbitrarily change the law in order to provide subsidies to people getting insurance through the federal exchange, even though the law explicitly says those handouts were only supposed to go to those getting policies through state exchanges (as the oily Jonathan Gruber openly admitted).

I’m disgusted that the lawyers at the Justice Department and the Office of White House Counsel didn’t have the integrity to say that handouts could only be given to people using state exchanges.

But most of all, I’m disgusted that the Supreme Court once again has decided to put politics above the Constitution.

In theory, the courts play a valuable role in America’s separation-of-powers system. They supposedly protect our freedoms from majoritarianism. And they ostensibly preserve our system of checks and balances by preventing other branches of the federal government from exceeding their powers.

To be sure, the courts – including and especially the Supreme Court – have not done a good job in some areas. Ever since the 1930s, for instance, they’ve completely failed to limit the federal government to the enumerated powers in Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution.

The most durable damage from Thursday’s decision is not the perpetuation of the ACA, which can be undone by what created it — legislative action. The paramount injury is the court’s embrace of a duty to ratify and even facilitate lawless discretion exercised by administrative agencies and the executive branch generally. …The decision also resulted from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s embrace of the doctrine that courts, owing vast deference to the purposes of the political branches, are obligated to do whatever is required to make a law efficient, regardless of how the law is written. What Roberts does by way of, to be polite, creative construing (Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting, calls it “somersaults of statutory interpretation”) is legislating, not judging. …Thursday’s decision demonstrates how easily, indeed inevitably, judicial deference becomes judicial dereliction, with anticonstitutional consequences. We are, says William R. Maurer of the Institute for Justice, becoming “a country in which all the branches of government work in tandem to achieve policy outcomes, instead of checking one another to protect individual rights.

Here’s the bottom line, from Will’s perspective.

The Roberts Doctrine facilitates what has been for a century progressivism’s central objective, the overthrow of the Constitution’s architecture. The separation of powers impedes progressivism by preventing government from wielding uninhibited power.

…the Supreme Court allowed itself to be intimidated. …the Court rewrote ObamaCare to save it—again. In doing so, the Court has sent a dangerous message to future administrations… The Court today validated President Obama’s massive power grab, allowing him to tax, borrow, and spend $700 billion that no Congress ever authorized. This establishes a precedent that could let any president modify, amend, or suspend any enacted law at his or her whim.

Now let’s look at the responses of two of Cato’s constitutional scholars. Roger Pilon is less than impressed, explaining that the Roberts’ decision is a bizarre combination of improper deference and imprudent activism.

With Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion for the Court, therefore, we have a perverse blend of the opposing positions of the judicial restraint and activist schools that reigned a few decades ago. To a fault, the Court today is deferential to the political branches, much as conservatives in the mold of Alexander Bickel and Robert Bork urged, against the activism of the Warren and Burger Courts. But its deference manifests itself in the liberal activism of a Justice Brennan, rewriting the law to save Congress from itself. As Scalia writes, “the Court forgets that ours is a government of laws and not of men.”

Chief Justice Roberts…admits, as he did three years ago in the individual-mandate case, that those challenging the administration are correct on the law. Nevertheless, again as he did before, Roberts contorts himself to eviscerate that “natural meaning” and rewrite Congress’s inartfully concocted scheme, this time such that “exchange established by the state” means “any old exchange.” Scalia rightly calls this novel interpretation “absurd.” …as Justice Scalia put it, “normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.” …like three years ago, we have a horrendous bit of word play that violates all applicable canons of statutory interpretation to preserve the operation of a unpopular program that has done untold damage to the economy and health care system.

Now I’ll add my two cents, at least above and beyond expressing disgust. But I won’t comment on the legal issues since that’s not my area of expertise.

Instead I’ll have a semi-optimistic spin. I wrote in 2013 that we should be optimistic about repealing Obamacare and fixing the government-caused dysfunctionalism (I don’t think that’s a word, but it nonetheless seems appropriate) of our healthcare system.

This latest decision from the Supreme Court, while disappointing, doesn’t change a single word of what I wrote two years ago.

P.S. Since today’s topic (other than my conclusion) was very depressing, let’s close by looking at something cheerful.

Well, now we have further evidence. Here’s some polling data from AEI’s most recent Political Report. As you can see, there’s a much stronger belief in self-sufficiency in the United States than there is in either Germany or Italy.

A London man whose leg was broken after thieves stole his bike was forced to take an Uber taxi to the hospital after he was told that his injury “wasn’t serious enough” to warrant an ambulance. …Suffering from a broken leg and lying on the ground in agony, he called 999, only for the person on the other end to tell him to call the 111 non-emergency number as his injury wasn’t sufficiently serious for an ambulance. Eventually, three police officers picked him up and drove him home. He then had to book an Uber taxi to take him to the hospital.

Though maybe this is an example of karma.

“That is the most disappointing thing. At the time I was incredulous. I’m always a defender of the NHS but I want to know why they didn’t listen to my call properly.”

Sort of like when a defender of the IRS experiences an audit.

So how does the government defend the fact that it ignored a man with a broken leg?

In a statement to the Standard, the LAS said: “From the information given us, the patient was concious and alert and had no immediately life-threatening injuries…”

Gee, how comforting. If you’re about to die, they’ll send an ambulance. But not for anything less than that.

I guess the National Health Service sets policy based on scenes from Monty Python movies. If you just have a “flesh wound,” you’re out of luck.

Some readers may be wondering if this is an isolated example of incompetence that shouldn’t be used to indict the British system.

That’s a fair point. Indeed, there are doubtlessly similar example of malpractice in the United States (particularly with Medicare and Medicaid) and other jurisdictions where government doesn’t run the entire healthcare system.

So let’s shift to a story in the U.K.-based Telegraph that is a searing critique of the overall track record of nationalized health care.

NHS delays diagnosing and treating cancer are costing up to 10,000 lives a year, experts have warned. …Britain has one of the lowest cancer survival rates in Western Europe. Nice said too many GPs are “guessing” whether symptoms could mean cancer, with late diagnosis responsible for thousands of deaths. … Britain is eighth from bottom in league tables comparing cancer survival in 35 Western nations, latest research shows, on a par with Poland and Estonia. …Each year, the UK has around 10,000 more cancer deaths which could have been prevented, compared with similar countries in Europe.

The (potentially) good news is that there is an effort to address this terrible track record.

For the first time, GPs will be issued with checklists of symptoms to help them spot the disease, in a bid to prevent at least half of the needless deaths. …Roger Goss, from Patient Concern, said he was surprised that doctors needed to be given such advice. “I would be quite worried if GPs don’t know the basics of common cancers and what to look out for,” he said. He also said that in too many areas, family doctors were under pressure to reduce the number of patients referred for tests, in order to save money.

The last sentence in the excerpt is worrisome. One of the big problems with government-run healthcare is that everybody is playing with other people’s money, and healthcare providers don’t have much incentive to be efficient or to cater to the needs of patients.

So I’m not overly optimistic that a new set of guidelines is going to have much effect on the quality of care on the other side of the Atlantic.

Oh, I almost forgot. Why does the title of this column include the parenthetical statement about not telling Paul Krugman about these examples of horrible results in the U.K.’s government-run healthcare system?

For the simple reason that we don’t want to burst his bubble. Krugman assured us back in 2009 that government-run healthcare was a good idea, writing that “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”

So I guess these horror stories we just reviewed are just a figment of someone’s imagination.

If the Court rules correctly (unlike, ahem, the last time the Justices dealt with Obamacare), it will then be very important that congressional reformers use the resulting mess to unwind as much of the law as possible.

But let’s set aside that issue because we have a great opportunity to review another example of how government-run healthcare is a miserable failure.

Our topic for today is government-dictated electronic health records (EHRs). Dr. Jeffrey Singer is on the front lines of this issue. As a physician in Arizona, he deals with the real-world impact of this particular mandate.

And he’s so unhappy that he wrote a column on the topic for the Wall Street Journal.

Starting this year, physicians like myself who treat Medicare patients must adopt electronic health records, known as EHRs, which are digital versions of a patient’s paper charts. …I am an unwilling participant in this program. In my experience, EHRs harm patients more than they help.

By way of background, he explains that EHRs were part of Obama’s failed “stimulus” legislation and they were imposed on the theory that supposed experts could then use the resulting data to make the system more efficient and effective.

The federal government mandated in the 2009 stimulus bill that all medical providers that accept Medicare adopt the records by 2015. Bureaucrats and politicians argued that EHRs would facilitate “evidence-based medicine,” thereby improving the quality of care for patients.

But Dr. Singer says the real-world impact is to make medical care less effective and more expensive.

Electronic health records are contributing to two major problems: lower quality of care and higher costs. The former is evident in the attention-dividing nature of electronic health records. They force me to physically turn my attention away from patients and toward a computer screen—a shift from individual care to IT compliance. …The problem is so widespread that the American Medical Association—a prominent supporter of the electronic-health-record program—felt compelled to defend EHRs in a 2013report, implying that any negative experiences were the fault of bedside manner rather than the program. Apparently our poor bedside manner is a national crisis, judging by how my fellow physicians feel about the EHR program.A 2014 surveyby the industry group Medical Economics discovered that 67% of doctors are “dissatisfied with [EHR] functionality.” Three of four physicians said electronic health records “do not save them time,” according to Deloitte. Doctors reported spending—or more accurately, wasting—an average of 48 minutes each day dealing with this system.

Here’s what he wrote about costs.

The Deloitte survey also found that three of four physicians think electronic health records “increase costs.” There are three reasons. First, physicians can no longer see as many patients as they once did. Doctors must then charge higher prices for the fewer patients they see. This is also true for EHRs’ high implementation costs—the second culprit. A Novemberreportfrom the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that the average five-physician primary-care practice would spend $162,000 to implement the system, followed by $85,000 in first-year maintenance costs. Like any business, physicians pass these costs along to their customers—patients. Then there’s the third cause: Small private practices often find it difficult to pay such sums, so they increasingly turn to hospitals for relief. In recent years, hospitals have purchased swaths of independent and physician-owned practices, which accounted for two-thirds of medical practices a decade ago but only half today. Two studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association and one in Health Affairs published in 2014 found that, in the words of the latter, this “vertical integration” leads to “higher hospital prices and spending.”

Last but not least, Dr. Singer explains that electronic health records don’t reduce errors or increase efficiency, notwithstanding the claims of advocates.

The EHR system assumes that the patient in front of me is the “average patient.” When I’m in the treatment room, I must fill out a template to demonstrate to the federal government that I made “meaningful use” of the system. This rigidity inhibits my ability to tailor my questions and treatment to my patient’s actual medical needs. It promotes tunnel vision in which physicians become so focused on complying with the EHR work sheet that they surrender a degree of critical thinking and medical investigation. Not surprisingly, a recent study in Perspectives in Health Information Management found that electronic health records encourage errors that can “endanger patient safety or decrease the quality of care.” America saw a real-life example during the recent Ebola crisis, when “patient zero” in Dallas, Thomas Eric Duncan, received a delayed diagnosis due in part to problems with EHRs.

Wow, not exactly an uplifting read.

Indeed, Dr. Singer’s perspective is so depressing that I hope he’s at least partially wrong. Maybe after a couple of years, and with a bit of luck, doctors will adapt and we’ll get some benefits in exchange for the $20 billion-plus of taxpayer money that has been plowed into this project (not to mention all the time and expense imposed on the medical profession).

But the big-picture lesson to be learned is that planners, politicians, and bureaucrats in Washington should not be in charge of the healthcare system.

Which brings us to the real challenge of how to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Government intervention is so pervasive in the healthcare sector that – with a few rare exceptions – normal market forces have been crippled.

Not because I like the overall law, but because honesty is the best policy.

Regular readers know that our healthcare system is screwed up by bad government policy. More specifically, spending programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, combined with tax preferences and regulations that encourage over-insurance, have created a giant third-party payer problem.

This has eviscerated the normal working of a competitive market. When people are spending their own money, they are careful and prudent. When they spend other people’s money, however, they are not overly concerned about cost.

As a result, we have a needlessly expensive system. And because third-party payer requires lots of administration and paper work, bad government policies also have caused absurd levels of inefficiency.

Well, there’s one small piece of Obamacare that actually is helping to mitigate this problem. The law includes a so-called Cadillac tax that caps the special tax preference for fringe benefits (if your employer provides you a health insurance policy as part of your compensation, that type of income isn’t taxed, unlike your cash wages).

And that reform is having a positive impact. Here are some passages from a Bloombergstory.

Large employers are increasingly putting an end to their most generous health-care coverage as a tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans looms closer under Obamacare. Employees including bankers atJPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)and college professors atHarvard Universityare seeing a range of moves to shift more costs to workers. …The tax takes effect in 2018, and employers are already laying the groundwork to make sure they don’t have to pay the 40 percent surcharge on health-insurance spending that exceeds $27,500 for a family or $10,200 for an individual. Once envisioned as a tool to slow the nation’s growing health-care tab, the tax has in practice meant higher out-of-pocket health-care costs for workers.

The last sentence in the excerpt, by the way, is economically illiterate.

The Cadillac tax will restrain health spending because it means higher out-of-pocket costs for consumers. They are going to have more authority and responsibility of how to spend their own money.

Think of this analogy. Will you eat more if I give you $25 to buy a meal or if I give you a pre-paid voucher for a $25 all-you-can-eat buffet?

If you’re a normal person, you’ll take the $25 cash, buy a meal for less than that amount, and save the extra money for something else.

But if you’re given a pre-paid voucher for the buffet, you’ll pig out because there’s no additional cost for consuming more items.

And the Bloomberg story includes evidence that giving consumers more control over their income is having the predicted positive effect.

The tax on Cadillac plans — named after the luxury vehicle to denote their lavishness — is one reason the growth in health-care premiums has slowed since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act took effect in 2010. …The tax “is having the effect that was intended, which is the cost of these plans are being reduced,” Christopher Condeluci, a former Senate Republican aide who helped design it, said in a phone interview. …Premium increases for employer-provided health insurance, which covers about48 percentof Americans, “slowed markedly” in 31 states since 2010, the year the Affordable Care Act became law, the New York-based Commonwealth Fundreportedtoday. Nationally, premium growth fell by about a percentage point after the law, to 4.1 percent a year on average, the report said.

By the way, I should hasten to add that I’m not happy about the way the Cadillac tax was adopted, for a major reason and a minor reason.

The minor reason is that, for reasons of both good tax policy and good health policy, I want to eliminate loopholes and tax preferences only if we can use every penny of revenue to finance lower tax rates.

And that’s exactly what you get with a flat tax, which is a system where you don’t even need a Cadillac tax because there’s no healthcare exclusion.

Under Obamacare, by contrast, the Cadillac tax limits the healthcare exclusion, but politicians used the money to finance bigger government.

Now let’s say something bad about Obamacare.

John Goodman of the Independent Institute has a column in today’s Wall Street Journal. He points out that the law is hurting many of the people it was supposed to help.

…the law is already hurting some of the people it was intended to help. By this time next year, we may find that many workers who earn within a few dollars of the minimum wage have less income and less insurance coverage (as a group) than they did before the mandate began to take effect.

How does John justify these assertions?

Because he did some real-world research, surveying 136 fast-food restaurants with 3,500 employees.

The results are not encouraging, at least for the workers.

Before 2014 about half the employees were “full time” as defined by ObamaCare; that is, they worked 30 hours or more a week. The potential cost to the employers of providing mandated health insurance to their full-time staff would have been about $7 million a year. But by the time the employers took advantage of all their legal options they were able to reduce their cost to less than 1% of that amount. The first step was to make all hourly workers part time. …workers in the survey whose hours were reduced to part time…can get subsidized insurance through an exchange, but they will be asked to pay up to 9.5% of their income for what is unattractive coverage. Some of them previously had mini-med plans, but this kind of insurance is no longer available to them. …Those few remaining full-time employees will get mini-med insurance for themselves, but they are unlikely to be able to afford coverage for any dependents they have. They will not get an ObamaCare bronze plan unless they fork over about one-tenth of their take-home pay, and they won’t be able to get bronze coverage for other family members unless they forfeit more than half their income. Out of 3,500 employees, only one that we know of got the kind of insurance that the architects of the Affordable Care Act wanted everyone to have.

One out of 3,500? Sounds like the typical success rate for a government program.

But since I obviously don’t control Republicans and since I freely admit that economists are lousy forecasters, let’s do something more practical to start 2015.

Let’s simply look at three very important things that may happen this year and what they might mean.

1. Will the Republican Senate support genuine entitlement reform?

One of the best things to happen in recent years is that House Republicans embraced genuine entitlement reform. For the past four years, they have approved budget resolutions that assumed well-designed structural changes to both Medicare and Medicaid.

There were no real changes in policy, of course, because the Senate was controlled by Harry Reid. And I’m not expecting any meaningful reforms in 2015 or 2016 because Obama has a veto pen.

But if the Republican-controlled Senate later this year approves a budget resolution with the right kind of Medicare and Medicaid reform, that would send a very positive signal.

I don’t even care if the House and Senate have a conference committee and proceed with actual legislation. As I noted above, Obama would use his veto pen to block anything good from becoming law anyhow.

My bottom line is simple. If GOPers in both the House and Senate officially embrace the right kind of entitlement reform, then all that’s needed is a decent President after the 2016 elections (which, of course, presents an entirely different challenge).

2. Will there be another fiscal crisis in Greece (and perhaps elsewhere in Europe)?

And the spending cuts in most cases haven’t been sufficient to balance budgets, so debt continues to grow (in some cases, there have been dramatic increases in general government net liabilities).

Sounds like a recipe for further crisis, right? Yes and no.

Yes, there should be more crisis because debt levels today are higher than they were five years ago. But no, there hasn’t been more crisis because direct bailouts (by the IMF) and indirect bailouts (by the ECB) have propped up the fiscal regimes of various European nations.

At some point, though, won’t this house of cards collapse? Perhaps triggered by election victories for anti-establishment parties (such as Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain)?

While I’m leery of making predictions, at some point I assume there will be an implosion.

Just for the sake of argument, however, let’s assume the Supreme Court decides the case correctly. That would mean a quick end to Obamacare subsidies in the dozens of states that refused to set up exchanges.

Sounds like a victory, right?

I surely hope so, but I’m worried that politicians in Washington might then decide to amend the law to officially extend subsidies to policies purchased through a federal exchange. Or politicians in state capitals may decide to set up exchanges so that their citizens can stay attached to the public teat.

In other words, a proper decision by the Supreme Court would only be a good outcome if national and state lawmakers used it as a springboard to push for repeal of the remaining parts of Obamacare.

If, on the other hand, a good decision leads to bad changes, then there will be zero progress. Indeed, it would be a big psychological defeat since it would represent a triumph of handouts over reform.

I guess I’m vaguely optimistic that good things will happen simply because we’ve already seen lots of states turn down “free” federal money to expand Medicaid.

France’s influential economist Thomas Piketty, author of “Capital in the 21st Century”, on Thursday refused to accept the country’s highest award, the Legion d’honneur… “I refuse this nomination because I do not think it is the government’s role to decide who is honourable,” Piketty told AFP.

It’s quite possible, perhaps even likely, that Piketty is merely posturing. But I heartily applaud his statement about the role of government.

The parents of a child suffering from a severe brain tumor signaled Monday they would defy efforts to force them to return to Britain, days after their family fled.

So why did they feel the need to escape a presumably civilized nation?

It seems government-run healthcare isn’t exactly on the cutting edge when it comes to life-saving treatments.

The family had fled to Spain in hopes of selling a property to obtain enough cash for a new treatment in the Czech Republic or the United States they hope will help their child. Police pursued them and issued an arrest warrant on suspicion of neglect after Southampton General Hospital realized their patient — Ashya King, 5 — was gone, without their consent. British authorities have made no apology for the warrant.

I can’t resist interrupting the main focus of the story at this point because the story then includes this line.

The case has riveted Britain, which is proud of a health service that offers universal care.

Maybe Brits are proud of their NHS, which would be a poor reflection on the collective IQ of the nation, but it certainly doesn’t offer universal care.

…the saga has…raised volatile questions of how much power authorities should have in interfering in some of the most sensitive of questions — and whether it has the right to insist that treatment dictates be followed. …Television images have shown the Kings being loaded into a Spanish squad car in handcuffs. When asked by the BBC on their views, the couple told the reporter they are just trying to help their child. …The family has criticized Britain’s health care system, saying he has a serious tumor that needs an advanced treatment option called proton beam therapy and that it wasn’t being made available to him. …Unlike other types of cancer treatment, it doesn’t indiscriminately kill surrounding healthy tissue, so there could be fewer long term effects.

But fear not. If little Ashya can somehow hold on until 2018, maybe the bureaucrats will be able to help.

Britain’s health department announced in 2011 it will build two treatment centers to make proton beam therapy available in London and Manchester from 2018. Until those facilities open, Britain will pay for patients eligible for the therapy to go to the USA and Switzerland for treatment. It wasn’t immediately clear why health care officials didn’t make this option available to Aysha.

As a parent, I know I would break the law if faced with the same situation.

It’s outrageous and disgusting, though, that such laws even exist.

P.S. I don’t mean to pick on the United Kingdom. We also have horror stories about government-run healthcare in the United States.

Instead, we’re going to look at some great moments in government-run healthcare in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Our first story is from the Chicago Tribune and it deals with Medicaid and Medicare spending.

But we’re not going to look at the aggregate data. Those numbers are very sobering, to be sure, and you can click here and here to learn more about that problem.

Instead, we’re going to drill down into the details and get some up-close evidence of why the programs are so costly. Simply stated, providers learn how to bilk the government.

A few years ago, Illinois’ Medicaid program for the poor noticed some odd trends in its billings for group psychotherapy sessions. Nursing home residents were being taken several times a week to off-site locations, and Medicaid was picking up the tab for both the services and the transportation. And then there was this: The sessions were often being performed by obstetricians and gynecologists, oncologists and urologists — “people who didn’t have any training really in psychiatry,” Medicaid director Theresa Eagleson recalled. So Medicaid began cracking down, and spending plummeted after new rules were implemented. …Illinois doctors are still billing the federal Medicare program for large numbers of the same services, a ProPublica analysis of federal data shows. Medicare paid Illinois providers for more than 290,000 group psychotherapy sessions in 2012 — more than twice as many sessions as were reimbursed to providers in New York, the state with the second-highest total. Among the highest billers for group psychotherapy in Illinois were three OB-GYNs and a thoracic surgeon. The four combined for 37,864 sessions that year, more than the total for all providers in the state of California. They were reimbursed more than $730,000 by Medicare in 2012 just for psychotherapy sessions, according to an analysis of a separate Medicare data set released in April.

Some of the specific examples are beyond belief. Keep in mind as you read the next passage that there are only 365 days in a year, and only about 261 workdays.

Of the Illinois OB-GYNs billing for group psychotherapy, Dr. Josephine Kamper had the highest number of sessions. She was paid for 10,399 sessions in 2012, at a cost to Medicare of $207,980. …Another OB-GYN, Lofton Kennedy Jr., billed for 9,154 group psychotherapy services. He declined to comment. The third-highest-billing OB-GYN, Philip Okwuje, charged Medicare for 8,584 group therapy sessions.

Illinois isn’t the only place where taxpayers are getting ripped off.

A Queens, N.Y., primary care doctor, Mark Burke, was paid for more sessions than anyone else in the country — 20,841. He accounted for nearly one in every six sessions delivered in the entire state of New York in Medicare, separate data show. He did not return messages left at his office. Another large biller was Makeba Gordon, a social worker in Detroit. She was reimbursed for nearly 5,000 group therapy sessions for her 26 Medicare patients, an average of 190 each. She also billed for 2,820 individual psychotherapy visits for the same 26 patients, who allegedly would have received an average of 298 therapy sessions apiece in 2012. Gordon could not be reached for comment.

And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the bureaucracy in Washington doesn’t seem overly worried about this preposterous waste of money.

Aaron Albright, a spokesman for the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said in an email that Medicare has no policy regarding which physicians may perform group psychotherapy. During such sessions, “personal and group dynamics are discussed and explored in a therapeutic setting allowing emotional catharsis, instruction, insight, and support,” according to rules set out by one of Medicare’s contractors.

The second story comes from the United Kingdom.

Regular readers know that the government-run healthcare system in the United Kingdom is an ongoing horror story of denied care, sub-standard care, and patient brutality (click here to see some sickening examples).

You would think the U.K.’s political class would respond by trying to use money more effectively.

You would be wrong. The bureaucrats somehow have decided that tax monies should be used to finance a sperm bank, even though private sperm banks already exist.

Britain is to get its first NHS-funded national sperm bank to make it easier for lesbian couples and single women to have children.For as little as £300 – less than half the cost of the service at a private clinic – they will be able to search an online database and choose an anonymous donor on the basis of his ethnicity, height, profession and even hobbies. …The National Sperm Bank will be based at Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust, which currently runs an existing NHS fertility clinic and recruits sperm donors from the local population. Funded by a £77,000 Government grant, the bank will be run by the National Gamete Donation Trust (NGDT) which this year received an additional £120,000 of public money to organise egg and sperm donation.

Some have criticized the initiative because it will purposefully increase the number of fatherless children.

…the move – funded by the Department of Health – is largely designed to meet the increasing demand from thousands of women who want to start a family without having a relationship with a man. Critics last night called it a ‘dangerous social experiment’ that could result in hundreds of fatherless ‘designer families’. …Ms Witjens rejected suggestions that children suffer adverse consequences from lacking a father figure. …Ms Witjens pointed to the removal of the reference to a ‘need for a father’ in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, when taking account of a child’s welfare when providing fertility treatment.

I’m sympathetic to the argument that children do best in conventional households with fathers, but my main reaction to this story is that government shouldn’t try to either penalize or subsidize unconventional households.

And a government-sponsored sperm bank definitely falls into the latter category.

But I’m not surprised. Governments love to squanders other people’s money, and the U.K. government has considerable expertise (if you can call it that) in this regard.

Heck, the U.K. healthcare system is even financing boob jobs. But we’re not talking about reconstructive surgery for women who had mastectomies. They pay for breast augmentation for women who claim “emotional distress.”